The Tech Day events today were a great prequel to the 2013
NERGC conference in Manchester, New Hampshire. I was thoroughly
fascinated by the lectures, and the time flew.
I also met dozens of new people, from places as close as the Manchester
Public Library to Washington State.
Everyone enjoyed NERGC’s very first Tech Day program, which was attended
by about 150 people. In the next room
over, Librarians and Teachers were enjoying their own set of lectures and
talks.
Stephen P. Morse |
We heard from Dr. Stephen P. Morse twice. If you haven’t used his “One Step” searchpages for Ellis Island and other genealogy websites, you are missing out on a
true technical marvel. Steve Morse holds
degrees in electrical engineering, and is the architect of the Intel 8086 chip
which made the first desktop IBM PCs available in the 1970s. In his first
lecture he explained the concept of Deep Linking, and how he used that to make
his internet searching website. In his
afternoon lecture he explained the Beider Morse Phonetic Name Matching
Algorithm used by search engines inside websites such as Ellis Island and
Sephardic Gen. The story behind the invention of these technical tools was
fascinating, and too long to tell here in a blog. If you ever have the chance to hear Dr.
Morse, take advantage!
There was an interruption in the afternoon session when we
first heard the perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombings had been caught,
and then it was announced to be a false alarm. For the home town crowd, we were
on pins and needles for a few moments.
New Hampshire’s own genealogist Laura Prescott presented a
lecture on Publishing Your Genealogy Online.
She gave examples of free and low cost ways of showing your research on
the internet. Unfortunately, none of the
vendors of these products will be at the NERGC Expo, such as Ancestry, TNG or
Legacy. She also showed a few
screenshots of the new FamilySearch website, which changed only yesterday. I played with the new site a little last
night, and it is very different looking, but all the same search features are
in the same places. Be sure to check it
out yourself.
Josh Taylor presents the Family House game |
FindMyPast was the sponsor of TechDay, and presented the
luncheon. Josh Taylor, brightsolid’s business
development manager, presented a corporate background of all the products in
the brightsolid family tree, such as Scotland’s People, FindMyPast, Genes
Reunited and a new game at the website www.FamilyHouse.com
He also spoke at the end of the afternoon on tools and methods of sharing genealogy online, including wikis, cloud computing, and other tools.
The Expo was not open yet today, but I was able to register
so I could skip that step first thing tomorrow morning. Maybe I can sleep in a little bit later. I have to stay
at NERGC until evening since I’ll be representing the New Hampshire Mayflower
Society at the society fair tomorrow night.
New England Regional Genealogy Conference www.nergc.org
New England Regional Genealogy Conference www.nergc.org
Steve Morse's Webpages http://stevemorse.org/
Laura Prescott, genealogist http://www.lauraprescott.com/
Findmypast.com http://www.findmypast.com/
Family House http://www.familyhouse.com/
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Copyright 2013, Heather Wilkinson Rojo
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